Last year, the US executed 52 people and handed out 106 death sentences; in Iran 388 executions were reported and in China the total is believed to run to thousands. Taking population into account, though, Iran probably has the world's highest execution rate.

This is counter to the worldwide trend over several decades that has seen a growing number of countries abandon the death penalty. A clear majority of them, Amnesty International says, "have concluded either that it is unnecessary, or that it is incompatible with modern standards of justice, or both.

"While today 139 countries have abolished capital punishment in law or practice, a handful of countries account for a majority of the world's executions."

Many of the countries that still retain the death penalty are in the Middle East. Besides Iran, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and the Palestinian territories have all executed people this year – and not always for murder. Several of them, but most notably Iran and Saudi Arabia, apply the death penalty for a range of offences such as drug trafficking and sexual misconduct plus, sometimes, religious "crimes" such as apostasy and witchcraft.

A further problem with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan is the continuing execution of juveniles – those who were under 18 when they committed the crime. They justify this on the grounds that they have a different view about the age of majority – basically, that puberty is what distinguishes children from adults – and Iran waits until juvenile offenders are 18 before executing them, but it's still a breach of international law. All three countries are parties to the convention on the rights of the child, which prohibits capital punishment for individuals who were under 18 at the time of the crime.

As in the US, the urge to execute is driven mainly by fundamentalist versions of religion, and the grotesque cases that occur in the Middle East – especially in Saudi Arabia and Iran – can easily give the impression that this is the regional norm. Perhaps surprisingly, though, it is not the norm.

Apart from Israel, which hasn't carried out any judicial executions since Adolf Eichmann in 1962, most Arab states apply the death penalty sparingly, if at all. Djibouti, a tiny Arab state in the Horn of Africa, has not executed anyone since becoming independent and it formally abolished the death penalty in 1995. Mauritania, a backward country in many other respects, has had no executions since 1987.

In Tunisia, the most recent execution was in 1991; in Algeria and Morocco it was 1993. Oman and Qatar have not executed anyone since 2001, Lebanon since 2004, Jordan since 2005, Kuwait since 2007. Somalia, Syria and the UAE have had no executions since 2008.

What this demonstrates is that Arab/Muslim countries – just like others – can get by perfectly well without the need to chop people's heads off or string them up from cranes.

But imposing a moratorium on executions (as several of the Arab countries seem to have done) is not the same as formally abolishing the death penalty – a move that is liable to stir up opposition from religious elements. Morocco considered abolition a few years ago but eventually dropped the idea.

In Algeria, even though executions have been suspended for the last 17 years, the courts have continued to hand out death sentences – with the result, according to Amnesty International, that Algeria ranks fourth in the world in terms of the number of death sentences passed.

Debate about the future of the death penalty surfaced in Algeria earlier this year when Farouk Ksentini, head of the National Advisory Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, announced that he was intending to lobby for full abolition.

This brought a predictable response from religious elements, with the Movement for Society and Peace saying: "We must preserve the death penalty as a precept set forth by the Qur'an." Similarly, Sheikh Bouamrane, head of the High Islamic Council, said he "could never endorse the abolition of the death penalty", because doing so would "jeopardise several verses of the holy Qur'an".